Researchers are trying to better understand how each person's unique genetic make-up affects her or his risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, as well as treatment response.
The study reviewed here found that breast cancers in women who have specific genetic traits (called subtypes) progress more rapidly than breast cancers in women who don't have these genetic traits. The same genetic traits also seem to influence how the breast cancer responds to chemotherapy.
When doctors better understand how each person's genetic make-up influences breast and other cancers, they hope to discover better ways to prevent and diagnose breast cancer, as well as decide on prognosis. In the future, it's very likely that a woman's genetic profile will help doctors choose a treatment plan based on her profile.
This vision is already a small reality. The MammaPrint test, which has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, analyzes 70 genetic traits of breast cancer cells to predict whether the cancer has a high or low risk of coming back. The MammaPrint test can help women and their doctors make more informed decisions about whether or not chemotherapy should be part of a treatment plan.
Stay tuned to breastcancer.org for the latest news on research on better ways to reduce risk, diagnose, and treat breast cancer.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Integrating genomic information with traditional clinical risk factors can refine the prognosis and help optimize treatment strategies for women with early breast cancer, a research team at Duke University reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week.
Dr. Anil Potti and colleagues in Durham, North Carolina, took a look back at clinical and genomic data from a National Institutes of Health repository containing tumor data for 964 patients with early stage breast cancer.
Within each risk category (low, intermediate, or high risk), the investigators identified prognostically significant clusters, "representing clinically important" genomic subtypes of breast cancer.
Specifically, in the low-risk category, a worse prognosis was associated with a gene expression profile that included activation of wound healing, invasiveness, chromosomal instability and deregulation of a key cancer-associated pathway.
Median relapse-free survival time in patients with this gene signature was 16 months less than among those with tumors exhibiting the inverse pattern, they found.
The prognostic clusters also have unique sensitivity patterns to commonly used chemotherapy drugs, the investigators report. .
In an editorial published with the study, Dr. Chiang-Ching Huang and Dr. Markus Bredel, from the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, note that genes that have mechanistic implications for breast cancer "represent potential targets for specific molecular therapy."
This strategy is "an advance in the changing landscape of oncology toward individualized patient management," they write.
SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, April 1, 2008.
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